How to bind arguments to given values in Python functions?

Question

I have a number of functions with a combination of positional and keyword arguments, and I would like to bind one of their arguments to a given value (which is known only after the function definition). Is there a general way of doing that?

My first attempt was:

def f(a,b,c): print a,b,c

def _bind(f, a): return lambda b,c: f(a,b,c)

bound_f = bind(f, 1)

However, for this I need to know the exact args passed to f, and cannot use a single function to bind all the functions I’m interested in (since they have different argument lists).

Asked By: user265454

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Source

Answer 1

You probably want the partial function from functools.

Answered By: Daniel Roseman

Answer 2

>>> from functools import partial
>>> def f(a, b, c):
...   print a, b, c
...
>>> bound_f = partial(f, 1)
>>> bound_f(2, 3)
1 2 3

Answered By: MattH

Answer 3

As suggested by MattH’s answer, functools.partial is the way to go.

However, your question can be read as “how can I implement partial“. What your code is missing is the use of *args, **kwargs– 2 such uses, actually:

def partial(f, *args, **kwargs):
    def wrapped(*args2, **kwargs2):
        return f(*args, *args2, **kwargs, **kwargs2)
    return wrapped

Answered By: Elazar

Answer 4

You can use partial and update_wrapper to bind arguments to given values and preserve __name__ and __doc__ of the original function:

from functools import partial, update_wrapper


def f(a, b, c):
    print(a, b, c)


bound_f = update_wrapper(partial(f, 1000), f)

# This will print 'f'
print(bound_f.__name__)

# This will print 1000, 4, 5
bound_f(4, 5)

Answered By: Mohammad Banisaeid

How to bind arguments to given values in Python functions?

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